Term three kids

Words by Jo Elwin

I was apprehensive walking into Urban Grind the morning I met Kate Bezar for a coffee and a chat about her temporary Wanaka life. Having just discovered that Kate was founder and editor of Dumbo Feather, the Australian interview-based magazine, I hoped that I was up to interviewing the seasoned pro. But Kate’s warmth and modesty instantly put me at ease. “Oh Dumbo Feather was 10 years ago,” Kate encourages me. “I sold it when my oldest was nine-months old because I just couldn’t do it anymore.” She has three children now and, after swearing she would never start up a business again, is co-owner of The Better Packaging Co, supplying the e-commerce industry with compostable packaging solutions.

With plastic waste reduction such a matter of urgency, it’s not surprising that business is booming. Kate is working for the Auckland-based company full time, albeit right now from Wanaka. She’s here with husband Mark and their boys, aged five, eight and nine, just for term three – ten weeks that are adding up to, as Kate says, “An experience of a lifetime for the kids. We’ve been creating memories and I think they’ll always have a strong connection to Wanaka, which is cool, it’s very different from where they’ve been brought up on Waiheke Island.”

Kate moved to Waiheke from Sydney when she still had Dumbo Feather. “Mark and I are New Zealanders and there was always an understanding that we would move back. When I got pregnant, it was ‘now is as good a time as any’. We had to be in Auckland for Mark’s work but neither of us particularly wanted to live there, so Waiheke was a way of being in Auckland without living in Auckland. My kids are the sixth generation of my family to live on the Island at some point. It’s a very special place for us and it’s a great place to live, much like Wanaka.” Kate says cheerfully.

She found it hard doing the magazine from Waiheke. “All my team and my contacts were in Sydney. I could do interviews over Skype but it’s not the same ... and I had a young baby … just way too hard.” That’s not the case with The Better Packaging Co. She puts the kids on the school bus and works from home three days a week, commuting to the Auckland office for the other two. School days follow a similar routine here in Wanaka without the two days in the Auckland office. “I envisaged going back every couple of weeks, but I have only been back once and I don’t intend doing it again, it’s not that easy.” We mutter our thoughts about the airport controversy and Kate says, “Wanaka is like Waiheke in that we hold very dear to us that sense of community and that slower pace of life, but we have to deal with the reality that we also rely heavily on tourism. Two years ago, when Fullers started making the ferry crossings more frequent it changed all our lives for the better, it made a lot of things simpler and easier. Living in places like this, there’s always compromise, there’s always trade-offs. You get to live somewhere special but there’s not going to be an international airport right there.”

From a corporate background with a degree in chemistry and economics, Kate says she is more a frustrated designer and has done all the striking design work for The Better Packaging Co herself.

While things are business as usual for Kate, life is quite different for Mark. About six months ago he took voluntary redundancy. “Suddenly we were like ‘Oh hello! We could go to South America for a couple of months and take the kids,” says Kate. “All sorts of possibilities opened up, but I was in the early stages of The Better Packaging Co and the thought of trying to work while travelling was not so appealing. Then Mark suggested we do Wanaka for a term and I said ‘absolutely, I can get easily back to Auckland if I need to’. Friends from Auckland did this two years ago and we came down and stayed with them for a week. At the time we thought ‘what an amazing thing to do’ but it was out of reach because Mark couldn’t just up and leave his job. So, we’ve just copied what they did, we’ve even rented the same house. We rented out our house on Waiheke, which wasn’t that easy but it’s nice to have someone in the house and it’s good financially.” Packing up the stuff of life doesn’t faze Kate. “We just put it all into a room that locks (the kids’ playroom) and we’re used to packing ourselves up – we rent the house out every Christmas when we go away. It’s like an annual spring clean – it forces you to declutter, clean properly and fix all those things that you never get around to. You sort stuff out. Which is also really nice to come back to.”

Then they packed the car. “It was full of boy equipment - all the skiing stuff, tennis rackets, bike helmets, rugby boots, bikes on the back and a huge box of linen that was supposed to go into the playroom - Mark can’t get over it.” Laughs Kate. And, while she spent the week in Auckland getting things sorted at work, Mark and the boys did a roadie down the East Coast. Kate will do the trip back with them, up the West Coast this time, and she’s not sure how they will fit everything in. I suggest that Wastebusters might benefit. “Yeah, the first thing we did when we got down here was go to Wastebusters to pick up a few things.” Kate agrees.

The boys attend Wanaka Primary and Kate says “They were very gracious about accepting them. I’m sure it’s inconvenient for the school but they’ve been great about it. Our kids are three of 30 who are just doing term three so it’s not uncommon. Amazing for a school that is bulging - at 800 kids, it’s twice the size of the school the boys go to on Waiheke. They charge a little more than normal school fees because they don’t get government funding for those kids. In the past they created a separate class for all the Term Three Kids, but they now absorb them into the existing classes which is great because they make friends with the locals. The kids coming to my eight-year-old’s birthday party this afternoon are all locals.” Kate can relax over coffee because the party is all sorted - they’re going climbing at Basecamp and she’s buying the cake. “I was going to make him one but there is no cake tin in the rental house. I said to my son ‘the bad news is there is no cake tin, so I won’t be able to make you a cake. And that’s also the good news because Mummy’s cakes aren’t that great’. ”

Kate and her family have spent every weekend of their time in Wanaka skiing Cardrona where she praises their work on reducing single-use plastics.

Kate calls herself as a “Greenie”. “When I started Dumbo Feather, I wanted it to make as little impact on the world as possible. It was printed using soy-based ink on 100 per cent recycled paper stock. I refused to send it out in a plastic sleeve, so it got sent to subscribers in a recycled paper envelope and quite a few of them got wet but I thought it was a small price to pay. The Better Packaging Co now has a solution: By making our home-compostable material thinner and see through we can do magazine wrap. Ravensdown have recently used it to send Ground Up magazine to their shareholders, which is cool because they can literally just dig it in to their composts. We’re very excited by that. And there’s a home-compostable label. We are aware that not everyone composts in New Zealand so that’s a challenge. We’re setting up a collection network that links places where you can take our packaging if you don’t have a compost. Cafes who use compostable coffee cups will quite often have bins outside. Fullers Ferries to Waiheke use compostable coffee cups so they now have a bin for food waste and compostable packaging, you could put your used courier satchel in there. The larger Z Energy stations have compost bins; You could take it to Wastebusters … It’s called product stewardship and we take it very seriously. We are taking responsibility for anything we are making throughout the whole length of its life cycle.”

Does this Greenie have any observations on Wanaka’s environmental efforts? “I love how Cardrona is single-use plastic free – it’s so easy to have reusable water cups, obviously you have to have more substantial washing facilities out the back but it’s brilliant and when you get a piece of pizza it’s on cardboard instead of plastic. Wastebusters has taken things to the next level, it’s an amazing facility and they have a woodburner in the shop! So cosy. Our rental is an 80s house with central heating powered by diesel. I am horrified at the heating bill and I can’t stand the thought of burning fuel, especially when there is hydro power right here. On an eco-level I’m trying not to think about it. It doesn’t have a compost bin either and that’s doing my head in, but I can’t make changes to a rental property.”

Kate’s husband and two of her children fishing the Clutha.

While Kate’s work has prevented her from doing as much as she would have liked down here – she’s yet to walk Mt Iron and has only just discovered Mediterranean Market - the boys are making the most of it. “Mark is doing a lot of fishing in the Clutha, he plays golf at Wanaka and recently played in the Tarras golf tournament. He does the supermarket shopping and picks up the kids and drops them off, if they’re not on the bus. This has been great for him and I don’t think he will go back to a five-days-a-week nine-to-five job.” They have all made the most of the skiing. “We’ve been heading to the North Island fields once a year for the last few years where you’re lucky if you get two out of four days skiing, so this is very special.” Says Kate. “Here we go up every weekend and there is school skiing on Thursdays. The kids are absolutely loving it and we really hope that this sets them up for a lifetime of skiing.”